


Cold War

by jat_sapphire



Series: Dirty Computer [3]
Category: The Professionals
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Halloween, M/M, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 14:40:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16286468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jat_sapphire/pseuds/jat_sapphire
Summary: "So you think I'm alone...." —Janelle Monàe





	Cold War

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from Janelle Monàe's song "Cold War," from her album _ArchAndriod_.
> 
> Another one I can't use warnings clearly for, sorry.

**Bodie**

 

Dark. Storage closet. Doyle not next to him.

He'd been shut down, but it didn't stop the emotions he was not supposed to have. He shouldn't be able to tremble, but he could feel tremors run through him, and neither his lips nor his hands were steady.

Bodie was sure they did not mean to let him remember, but the more they tried to stop him, the stronger the memories were.

Doyle. His skin, real human skin under Bodie's living hands. The smell of his sweat, his semen. His laugh, his mouth in all its shapes, the way they tasted together. All of him, moving, at rest, heavy on top of Bodie, active beneath him, thick inside him. All, all, all of Ray Doyle that was gone.

They were right about tears, though. He had none.

It might have been the same day as his shut down, or the next, or years later. He had new orders.

The room outside the storage closet, the halls and stairs and car park, were empty, not a footfall or a breath. One or two cars—yes, there was the third—in the central city, a few more as he drove farther, several in the car park at his destination. The building was as old as HQ, probably older, with wide stairs and open windows. Ivy on the walls, lawns around it, and lavender in beds under the windows and close to the walls. Guards were concealed, but Bodie saw them. They would not matter by the time he reached his target, and he was sure they could not stop him even if they tried.

He walked around the side of the house, where the windows were closed and smaller. He saw people moving behind the glass, heard faintly the sounds of talking and doors and drawers. He found a service entrance and went in. Still, he was not challenged. Possibly, the occupants were very, very careless.

Possibly, they expected him.

The plans of the house were in his mind, easy to access. He went up to the second floor, moved to the room at the very back of the house, the one that overlooked the back garden. A man was there. As Bodie entered, he was sitting at a large desk, chair tilted back and feet crossed near the wooden inbox, laptop open and a finger moving back and forth on his lower lip. He'd been looking at the ceiling, but jumped to his feet, sending the chair scooting back on its castors and grabbing the edge of the desk. Staring, but not with fear.

Bodie stared back. He saw close-cropped salt-and-pepper curls, a compact build. The brows arched; the man pushed thick glasses up his nose and cleared his throat.

"It's a good job, though years out of date," he said, his voice gravelly but still identifiable, like the lump of his broken cheek.

"Ray," Bodie said. His hand rose without his will, at another's command. But he stopped it. "I thought you were dead, the real you." Here was the man for whom he would have wept; living, he needed no tears.

Perhaps if Bodie had been able to cry, it would not have been for him.

He thought of the android Doyle, his own urge to run away.

"Now they've sent me to kill you." He heard the disbelief in his own voice.

"Again," Ray said.

 

**Doyle**

 

The older Bodie, the real man, smirked in a way Doyle suddenly recognised and felt like a sparking energy surge.

"Here to kill me, are you?" he said jovially, the lines on his face crinkling. "They don't learn, do they? Well, here I am." He spread his hands.

Doyle stepped closer to the desk, let his arm swing forward into the wood and let it be trapped there. He stared and stared, seeing the quickened breath, the veins in the whites of sharp blue eyes, the hairline that was higher and a different shape than his android partner's. "I can't."

"Good lad." He leaned to his intercom, pushed a button. Doyle could not hear an answering voice: it must be coming through the plug in the man's ear. "Ray? Yes, me too. Takes you back, dunnit? Remember that mop of yours? Look, Jax in yet? Yeah, right now." He paused, then said quickly, as if he couldn't help it, "You're all right? ... Yeah, 'course you are." He let the first button go, then pushed another. "Jax, robot dopplegangers are back. No, 's fine. But let's ... yeah. OK." Letting the second button go, he leaned back in the desk chair and looked at Doyle. "Are you wireless? Can they hear what you say?"

Doyle wasn't sure, when they were off-site, so he tilted his head to the right, then the left.

Live-Bodie pressed his lips together. "Could have cameras in your eyes too," he said, then raised his eyebrows, tipped his head to his left to ask.

Shaking his head, Doyle held out one hand, then waved it impatiently. Bodie grinned. "Very lifelike." But he gave Doyle the piece of paper and pen that he wanted.

 _Cameras in rooms at HQ,_ he wrote, _wouldn't need if we had._ Then he wrote the street address. _Took some kind of drugs to addresses yesterday. Bodie had bombs, I think._

"They're _terrible_ programmers!" Bodie was delighted.

Doyle smiled.

Android-Bodie, live-Ray, live-Bodie, and Android-Doyle met with Jax in Bodie's office.  The two machines stood together.  Ray leaned on the desk and live-Bodie sat in the chair again, swinging it back and forth.  Jax, a lean black man whom neither android remembered, had Bodie's access plate open on his back and was poking about in the circuitry.  By his expression and his clenched fists, Bodie found this upsetting.

"It's not so much bad programming," Jax said thoughtfully.  "Technically, they were brilliant.  Look at the facial responses."

Bodie demonstrated unintentionally, with a grimace fit for a situation they'd never been in before.

"But it's as if they had no idea how memory and emotion _work_ , how they're connected. As if love was actually in the heart, or fear in the gut." Jax shook his head.

Perhaps it was the discussion of body parts and memory, but Doyle suddenly was swept with a flashback so vivid it made him dizzy.

"What?" said his partner, voice low though the rest were all looking.

"You ... remember the grenade? You kicked?"

Ray frowned. "Of course you did. Kick a grenade." He glared impartially at both Bodies.

Doyle still spoke to Android-Bodie. "You were down. There were pieces everywhere. A foot. I picked it up." Doyle swallowed. "Mr Cowley said ... 'Leave that. It's not important.'" _Not important!_ The broken sole, the frayed ankle, the choking weight in his throat. To fight them off, he looked down at his partner's feet, matched, whole. 

"But they did rebuild me." Bodie held Doyle's arm.

Ray spoke forcefully, pulling Doyle out of the recall, both androids out of their unprogrammed moment. "That wasn't Cowley."

"They couldn't even have _listened_ to Cowley," live-Bodie said.  "Never paid attention, just killed him.  He knew well enough that our primary loyalty was to each other.  Didn't like it, mind you—"

Ray leaned over and poked him.  "Not so much of the ' _was_.'"

Repentantly, Bodie looked up through still-impressive eyelashes, and both Doyles rolled their eyes.

Jax stood up and reached for the access plate, screwed it back on.  He sighed.  "No remote shut-downs, stopped that," he said, "but it'll still be faster if they just tell or write down the delivery addresses than if I hack them.  And the choice is really the same as last time."

No one was amused now.  Doyle looked at Bodie, who looked back.  They didn't need to hear what that choice had been.  There was a reason they didn't remember that last time.

"What's to stop them making another pair?" live-Bodie asked.

Ray snorted.  "Innate intelligence, if they had it."

"Yeah, clearly not," Jax put in.  "If I didn't already think they were barking mad, they'd fit that definition of doing the same thing again, hoping the result will change."

Android-Bodie raised his head.  He looked so dangerous that both Ray and Doyle stood straight and stared at him. 

"It's not us you want gone," he said.  "Not just us."

 

**Bodie**

 

They said farewell like soldiers. Jax shook their hands. The older Bodie put his hand on Bodie's shoulder, ruffled Doyle's hair. Ray touched Bodie's cheek and took Doyle by his upper arms. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm not," Doyle answered. What he said next made Bodie take a deep, proud breath and nod back to the living men. 

The androids drove separately back to HQ, and climbed the stairs to the VIP Lounge. Bodie sat hard on the sofa, making dust fly up. He put his hands on his head as if it were spinning. "I'm so _confused_. Everything's mixed up. It made me slow."

"Yeah. Let's find Dr Ross."

They started at the top of the building and worked down, searching rooms that echoed with emptiness and were muffled with dust. The control centre was in Mr Cowley's office, which had been Bodie's guess. He grasped Doyle's hand as they went in. Both the people they had known as Dr Ross and Mr Cowley sat there, surrounded by screens, and both stood as if surprised.

One last glance at Doyle, who was grinning. Nothing could stop them: Bodie pulled him close and put his lips to Doyle's, the way he remembered but had never done. Of their own free will and with its pressure-sensitive trigger, the bomb Jax had placed in their bodies exploded.

The last Bodie saw was the glint of Doyle's smile, and his last thought was Doyle saying, "Even if you were the ones owned us, we'd still be owned. This way, we do the right thing, and it's us doing it."

**Author's Note:**

> "...you better know what you're fighting for." —Janelle Monàe, "Cold War"


End file.
